FEAR and Quake 4 kills my rig

[akshayt]

Hi

I have a radeon x1900xtx, 2gb ddr 400 at stock, amd 64bit 3200 winchester at stock.

On what settings can I play Quake 4 and FEAR, my res can't go beyond 1280*1024, is there a huge differnce is performance between xt and xtx?

This link got me
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=523

how will my rig survive?

 

[Soccerman06]

Not enough to notice by eye. You should get more of a boost by ocing that 3200 and memory of yours than getting an XTX

 

[tuteja1986]

oc the amd 3200

 

[josh6079]

Agreed. Overclock the AMD, and your ram. 1280 x 1024 is what is limiting your X1900's power. There is not a huge performance difference between the XT and XTX.

 

[akshayt]

I don't want to overclock the cpu, I don't want to loose my warranty.
Please tell me at what settings will I be able to play if everything is kept at stock and how much differnce does 20% cpu overclock make, though I probably won't do it, just for knowledge?

 

[akshayt]

I have seen toms cpu charts and according to that my cpu beats even a Intel 965 EE by a small margin in gaming, is this true?

 

[framerateuk]

You should easily be able to play Quake 4 maxed out with that setup, i play it at 1920x1200 on mine on very high (ive never bothered with the useless Ultra Mode).

Fear is a lot more demanding on the CPU. You'll probably be able to max out the graphics setting, but cut back on the physics so your cpu can cope.

 

[akshayt]

What you talking, if you see any benchmark, FEAR performs equal on all cpus, even on 1280*1024 max, a celeron and FX 7 perform equal, it is whooly dependant on the gpu.

Also, when I say maxed out, I mean maxed out, including soft shadows, ultra high etc.
Every thing maxed other than aa and af.
I want to play both FEAR and Q4
at 1280*1024 maxed 4x aa 16x af

 

[framerateuk]

I play Fear at 1920x1200 with 4xAA and 16xAF. Everything turned up, and get around 35fps on average.

Fear is very tough on the CPU, hence why it has different settings for physics, on my old processor i had to turn the physics down, but on my X2 it works on the second highest setting with no problems, turning it up anymore really slowed the game down.

 

[hardwareking]

uh if u have all the stuff.Why don't u just run the games and different settings and see which is most comfortable.
Your athlon 3200 will be a bottleneck at 1280x1024.But it shouldn't be that bad.

 

[otispunkmeyer]

im with the guys that say overclock, i know you dont wanna do it, but i was the same.... i didnt wanna do it becuase i didnt know how. but here i am today gone from 2.0 to 2.5 and its definately noticable, even jus booting to windows and waiting for it to get sorted is much faster everything feels a lot zippier and its whats actually stopped me going dual core...for now

 

[SpeedZealot369]

My bro had a x1900xt with his 2ghz amd64 processor, it was a serious bottleneck. Even at 1600x1200 with aa and af fear was struggling...

Definitly without a question oc that cpu, even 200-300 mhz will make a difference.

 

[akshayt]

Please, I am not willing to take the risk, who will pay if warranty goes bad?
also, my friend with amd 64 bit 3200 with 7600gt runs FEAR ok at 1024*768 maxed, softshadows off

According to the benchmarks, I have seen, it doesn't matter whether the cpu is intel 840 or amd fx 57 for FEAR.

Visit these links
http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=523
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/15/...rd_buyers_guide_2006_part3/page45.html
http://xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/cpu-games2_4.html

Don't you think that it would be stupidity to overclock for a cpu and void warranty for smoething that doesn't need that extra power or doesn't use it?

 

[Maximilian]

You have one of the most powerful graphics cards on the planet, and a CPU that is superior to 90% of those out there, even for gaming purposes.

You shouldnt have problems running Quake 4, none at all, a 9800 PRO can run Quake 4. Go play with the settings, turn down the 4xaa and 16xaf until you can actually notice a difference in visual quality. You dont need to overclock one of the fastest systems out there to make it run a game built on a 2-3 year old engine.... FEAR is another story though, it can bring SLI rigs to its knees, it was coded by poorly trained monkeys who can barely use a keyboard yea but seriously its not an efficiently coded game, half life 2 is an example of an efficiently coded game/engine.

I think you should overclock, but what im saying is you shouldnt NEED to overclock to run those games. Only oc the CPU though, not the ram, not the very very powerful g-card (defeats the purpose of having a very very powerful g-card) It has an auto-overclock thing anyways if you really wanna mess with it.

 

[akshayt]

how do you overclock amd cpu without over clocking the ram, what about warranty and all benchies i have seen tell me that FEAR is the only game where my cpu and FX 57 are more or less on power with all hope on the graphic card.

 

[Keysplayr]

Originally posted by: akshayt
how do you overclock amd cpu without over clocking the ram, what about warranty and all benchies i have seen tell me that FEAR is the only game where my cpu and FX 57 are more or less on power with all hope on the graphic card.

If you don't wish to overclock, then don't. Just experiment with the settings. Turn soft shadows off, but leave regular shadows on. Turn down AA a notch, etc. etc.

Are you willing to try this? Or are you just looking for an answer nobody can give you except yourself?

 

[akshayt]

Soft shadows depend on gpu, right?

Also, all benchies I have seen make my cpu equal to FX 57 or very high class processors in FEAR, can you give benchies that prove this wrong.

 

[Keysplayr]

Yes, soft shadows depends on GPU. And your 3200 is not equal to an FX-57. It is somewhat slower.

 

[lopri]

Something's gotta be wrong with your setup. Have you tried any other games? Fast CPU will help real-life gaming regardless of what situation (You know, all the background stuff, Windows scheduling, driver overhead, etc.), but of course it's about a matter of degree. Anyway, if you're reluctant to OC'ing,

Well, forget about CPU OC'ing. My guess is your hardware is configured wrong and there are bottlenecks such as IRQ sharing, etc. Or another guess is that you have 2 million spyware running background and your hard-disks are 99% fragmented, etc. Try some other CPU/GPU intensive games and see if things get any better. If not, it's not your CPU nor GPU. Do a fresh install of XP and don't use Internet.

 

[Navid]

To convince yourself one way or another, without overclocking, why don't you underclock?!

Run a benchmark that tells you how fast your rig runs Quake or FEAR. There must be a benchmark that you can find to do that for you. The idea is to have a repeatable test.

Then, run this benchmark at different CPU clocks all lower than the default. I may be wrong. But, I don't think underclocking should void your warranty. If it does, forget about this post.

Then, you can see how changing the CPU clock frequency affects the performance. You can then estimate how it could improve it if you did overclock. This will be an extrapolation. It will not be perfectly accurate. But, it will be a good estimate.

 

[hardwareking]

all warrantees are meant to be voided one day or another.
And ur cpu will never be equal to the fx-57.The 3200+ can be quite easily OCed to 2.6ghz.That would reduce the nottleneck by quite a bit.
As far OCing the cpu without OCing the ram.Set the ratio in ur bios.Instead of 1:1(Bus Speed:Ram Speed)Set it as 2:1.(Am i right about this,cause i've never really used an amd cpu,i've only oced intel ones and this based off all the reviews and benchies i've seen)
But regardles i'm right about the part where that 3200+ can be oced to 2.6ghzon the stock cooler.

 

[nib95]

I play those at 1920 x 1200 max settings and get 50+ fps average.
SLI 7900 GT cant be that far off from an XTX.
So I guess it's down to the CPU.

 

[akshayt]

Have any of you seen the links I mentioned, Amd 64bit 3200 almost equals Amd FX 57 in FEAR and not other games.

http://www.legionhardware.com/document.php?id=523
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/15/...rd_buyers_guide_2006_part3/page45.html
http://xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/cpu-games2_4.html

Also, I have Amd 64bit Winchester 3200 + Asus A8N E, with normal ram not overclockable ram, and stock coolers for everything, what is the possibility of frying the rig/cpu and how much can I overclock comfortably and how do I do that?

 

[orangat]

Originally posted by: akshayt
Have any of you seen the links I mentioned, Amd 64bit 3200 almost equals Amd FX 57 in FEAR and not other games.
........
Also, I have Amd 64bit Winchester 3200 + Asus A8N E, with normal ram not overclockable ram, and stock coolers for everything, what is the possibility of frying the rig/cpu and how much can I overclock comfortably and how do I do that?

What are you looking for? More reassurance? If you are too scared to overclock, then don't do it. Its better to have good coolers instead of stock since India is so hot.

Just get the x1900xt or xtx and your games will be much faster instead of the 6600gt.

 

[Malladine]

yeah, FEAR is notoriously GPU limited.